Rush Hour 3

Jackie Chan looks older now, but his acrobatic skill and energy seem undiminished. And Chris Tucker is still riffing exuberantly on his now-familiar schtick. But the Rush Hour franchise looks a little tired this time out. The ongoing enterprise has enough show-biz prestige now that it can attract such European star/talents as Max Von Sydow, Roman Polanski and Yvan Attal to its cast. Unfortunately, even the two stars have very little to do here apart from the required generic routines. Worse yet, Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay is strangely callous and brutal in both its dramatic violence and its formulaic comedy. At times, it all feels like a rather cynical attempt to graft the Chan-Tucker partnership onto a grim and possibly third-rate Asian action-movie plot. None of the actors (apart from Hiroyuki Sanada’s villain) are well-served in the process, but the initial box-office success suggests that the producers (including director Brett Ratner) have not lost their sense of where the profits lie.